Am I too late? It was only by the greatest cunning, by the greatest determination, by the most ruthless disregard of everything that I succeeded in getting away from home. My younger sister tried to bar the door. Even the servant girl! But I told mama that if they wouldn't let me out through the door, they might just as well bar the window, else I'd reach the street through it, although it's three stories high. I flew. I'm more dead than alive. But I am prepared for anything. How was it with your father, Erich? SPITTA We have parted. He thought that I was going out to eat husks with the swine as the Prodigal Son did, and told me not to take it into my mind ever again to cross the threshold of my father's house in my future capacity as acrobat or bareback rider, as he was pleased to express it. His door was not open to such scum! Well, I'll fight it down! Only I'm sorry for my poor, dear mother.--You can't imagine with what abysmal hatred a man of his kind considers the theatre and everything connected with it. The heaviest curse is not strong enough to express his feelings. An actor is, to his mind, _a priori_, the worst, most contemptible scamp imaginable. WALBURGA I've found out, too, how papa discovered our secret. SPITTA My father gave him your picture. WALBURGA O Erich, if you knew with what awful, with what horrible names papa overwhelmed me in his rage. And I had to be silent through it all. I might have said something that would have silenced all his lofty moral discourses and made him quite helpless before me. I was almost on the point of saying it, too. But I felt so ashamed for him! My tongue refused to form the words! I couldn't say it, Erich! Finally mama had to intervene. He struck me! For eight or nine hours he locked me in a dark alcove--to break my stubbornness, as he put it, Erich. Well, he won't succeed! He won't break it! SPITTA [_Taking WALBURGA into his arms._] You dear, brave girl! I am beginning to see now what I possess in having your love, what a treasure you are! [_Passionately._] And how beautiful you look, Walburga! WALBURGA Don't! Don't!--I trust you, Erich; that's all. SPITTA And you shall not be disappointed, dearest. You see, a man like me in whom everything is still in a ferment, who feels that he was born to achieve something great and significant but something which, for the present, he can make sufficiently clear neither to himself nor to the world--such a man has, at twenty, every man's hand against his and is a burden and a laughing-stock to all the world. But believe me: it will not always be so! The germs of the future lie in us! The soil is being loosened even now by the budding shoots! Unseen to-day, _we_ are the harvest of the future! We _are_ the future! And the time will come when all this great and beautiful world will be ours! WALBURGA Ah, go on, Erich! What you say heals my heart. SPITTA